On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 03:23:04PM +0100, Robin Green wrote:
I suggest that a Haskell program should be treated as an executable specification. In some cases the compiler can't optimise the program well enough, so we (by which I mean, ordinary programmers, not compiler geeks) should be able to explicitly provide our own optimisations, as rewrite rules (generalised ones, or specialised ones for individual functions). Democratise the means of automated optimisation! Then we should be able to prove formally that our rewrite rules preserve functional correctness. This is the approach I am pursuing in the programming language I am working on, which is a derivative of Haskell.
have you seen the RULES pragma? it is implemented in both ghc and jhc. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4/html/users_guide/rewrite-rules.html John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈